Telecom and Vodafone say they have fixed faults that plagued their email services for much of the day.

A fault with YahooXtra email prevented some users from sending and receiving email through Microsoft Outlook. Customers could still send and receive email through webmail.

Vodafone had the opposite problem; webmail was unavailable for some customers, but they could still use email clients such as Outlook. Vodafone notified customers of the problem shortly before noon only after being contacted by BusinessDay.

Hundreds of thousands of customers use YahooXtra in conjunction with Outlook.

Telecom acting chief executive Chris Quin tweeted when Telecom had found and fixed the problem.

Telecom spokeswoman Jo Jalfon said not all customers had been affected by its fault but did not know the proportion.

Last month YahooXtra experienced two major faults. One delayed the delivery of email to a significant proportion of customers and resulted in a substantial backlog of emails. An earlier spam-related issue meant email to and from thousands of corporate customers was delayed by up to a few days.

Jalfon said Telecom was not reviewing its email outsourcing contract with its joint venture provider YahooXtra and that had not been called for by its customers.